Celebrating Douglas Mawson in Antarctica

It is 100 years since Douglas Mawson‘s epic voyage and trek in Antarctica. In this celebratory address at the Australian Academy of Science, historian Tom Griffiths takes us back and examines the real reasons behind this treacherous expedition.

Supporting Information

Music used:

Penguin Ballet from

Antarctica - suite for guitar and orchestra

Composer: Nigel Westlake

Performers: The Tasmanian Symphony Orchestra conducted by David Porcelijn

Transcript

Robyn Williams: Professor Griffiths is from the ANU and this year gave the speech at the dinner of the Australian Academy of Science, whose main seminar was to celebrate 100 years of research in Antarctica, and specifically the end of Mawson's epic voyage and trek. Here Tom Griffiths examines two menus; the Academy's, and Douglas Mawson's.

Tom Griffiths: On 25 February, 1912, just over 100 years ago, the men of the Australasian Antarctic Expedition at their main base at Cape Denison in Antarctica had another grand ceremonial dinner, just as we are doing tonight. They enjoyed fine food, not as fine as our own meal, but pretty good for a remote outpost at the bottom of the world. Their menu was tomato soup, followed by roast lamb and mint sauce with champignon, green peas and new potatoes. Then they enjoyed raspberries with custard and jellies. And the cooks were the Swiss ski champion Xavier Mertz and the geologist and a future fellow of the Australian Academy of Science, Frank Stillwell. And as we've heard, Frank's original Antarctic diary is kept in the Basser Library in the Shine Dome and there's an exhibition there, and of course the annotated edition of his diary, edited, I might say, by another great cook and another great Antarctic enthusiast Bernadette Hince.

After dinner the leader of the expedition, Douglas Mawson, handed around a box of cigars and later some port wine. It was a rather smaller gathering than ours is tonight. They just had 18 men squeezed into a tiny Baltic pine hut, anchored on a scrap of rock in the windiest place at sea level on the planet.

Another eight men in the expedition were hunkered down on an ice shelf 2,000 kilometres further west, and a further five were maintaining a weather and wireless station on Macquarie Island.

Those at the main base enjoying their dinner had decked the interior of their little hut with flags, the Union Jack, and also the flag of the newly federated Commonwealth of Australia. And Mawson presented himself at dinner that night wrapped in an Australian flag. That was a flamboyant and significant gesture from a man known for his reserve.

And after dinner Mawson made a speech, and in a few moments I'll tell you what he said that night. But since you were dining in fine style and remembering Mawson's men doing the same, let's just take a moment to recall that food in Antarctica wasn't always that good.

Early Antarctica was full of men who hadn't cooked much before, working with very limited ingredients. It was not a promising recipe. The privations of exploration and starvation however meant that rarely have people celebrated food with such an edge of desperation. Unsatisfied hunger brings gravity to the handling of food. In a sledging tent on the ice cap, every crumb, every morsel was measured, distributed equally and savoured long and longingly.

A cook is, as we know, famously the most important member of any remote expedition, and can make or break the experience. At one Australian Antarctic station it was said that the plumber volunteered to do the bread baking because it gave him a chance to get his hands clean. He attributed the special flavour of his bread to his custom of wearing his lucky sewerage overalls as he baked.

On the Antarctic peninsular during one American expedition, little alcohol had been brought south, so the men worked their magic with dried fruit fermented with baker's yeast. And on special occasions the biologist would ration out the alcohol from his bottles of preserved specimens. Thus in that little community, drinking became known as 'draining a fish'.

Members of Douglas Mawson's Australasian Antarctic Expedition blessed their leader for providing absolute alcohol for the Primus stove instead of methylated spirit, for it undoubtedly enhanced servings of tea and cocoa. And Mawson wasn't renowned as a cook at home, but in Antarctica he was admired for doing a delicious crumbed seal in its own blood.

When those men sat down to that dinner in the hut just over a century ago, it was nearly the end of summer. Their ship, the Aurora, had sailed away from Cape Denison on 19 January, and Captain Davis had written in his diary, 'They are a fine party of men, but the country is a terrible one to spend a year in.'

By late February the dreadful winds were strengthening, the Antarctic cold deepening, the days shortening. The men were impatient to take their last opportunity to make some exploratory sledging trips, but the weather was poor, so instead they held a ceremony that day before they sat down to their grand dinner.

They had been six weeks at Cape Denison and finally they gave themselves a moment for ritual and reflection. Mawson nervously conducted a divine service in the hut that day. He read from the Bible, said some prayers and they all sang hymns. And to keep them in tune, Frank Stillwell played the little organ that they had carefully unpacked from the ship. What a versatile fellow.

Immediately after the service they stepped outside into the bitter wind and Mawson hauled the Union Jack to the top of the pole on the apex of the hut, and with rousing cheers they annexed Adele Land to the British Empire, and Frank Hurley of course filmed the ceremony.

Even though the proceedings were conducted solemnly, Cecil Madigan noticed the beautiful snow petrel hovering nearby, and he and Frank Bickerton were deputed to slip away and shoot it as a specimen. So flag raising was all very well provided that it didn't interfere with the science.

Historians of Empire, looking for conspicuous political moments, have often been distracted by this flag ceremony and have, as a consequence, belittled the science that suffused the expedition and galvanised the men. One historian argued this summer that Mawson's expedition was about territorial gain, not science. It has all been done in the name of territorial acquisition and retention, with science acting as a cover. Science, according to this argument, was only the supposed purpose of Mawson's expedition. Its real aim was territorial acquisition and economic gain.

This critique goes to the heart of enduring debates in Antarctic affairs about the balance between science and politics. And we know that in the post-war period a remarkable resolution of Antarctic territorial claims and rivalries emerged in the form of the Antarctic Treaty, which was signed by 12 nations, including Australia, in Washington in 1959, and which came to force in 1961. And the first Antarctic Treaty Consultative Meeting, which is the annual assembly for Antarctic governance, was held next door in Old Parliament House here in Canberra. And the latest such meeting is in June this year and will be hosted again by Australia in Hobart.

As we today confront the global challenge of climate change, the Antarctic Treaty offers an inspiring example of how respect for science can constructively inform world politics and even create a new model of governance. Australia has been a major and positive player in the Antarctic Treaty system, and was, for example, a leader in the political revolution of 1989 to '91 when Treaty nations abandoned a mining convention and negotiated instead the Madrid Protocol on Environmental Protection.

So there's no question that today fine science is the currency of influence in Antarctic affairs. Therefore it is with legitimate pride that we can look back 100 years and recall an expedition that was the most earnestly and impressively scientific of the whole heroic era of Antarctic exploration. This is a very enabling and empowering inheritance to have in Antarctica today.

Of course I'm not arguing that claiming sovereignty wasn't important to Douglas Mawson. His whole career was testimony to his lifelong conviction that Australia must secure its political and economic interests in Antarctica. He wanted to explore new territory, and especially the vast stretch of Antarctic coastline directly south of Australia.

Mawson also saw an opportunity to demonstrate Australia's frontier vigour on the world stage, to prove, as he put it, that the young men of a young country could rise to those traditions which have made the history of British polar exploration one of triumphant endeavour as well as of tragic sacrifice.

So the Australasian Antarctic Expedition of 1911 to '14 was a contribution to the British Empire's embrace of Antarctica, but it was also a distinctively Australian endeavour, a proud initiative of the recently federated nation, driven by a new-found nationalism, and by a southern hemisphere sensibility about the need to know one's own backyard, to understand the shared world of stormy sea and swelling icy air that emanated from the neighbouring Antarctic region. Exploring Antarctica was Australia's duty, Australia's preserve, Australia's destiny.

It's often been claimed that the Australian nation was born in 1915 on a war-torn beach far away in Turkey on the other side of the world. But the heroic landing a few years earlier at Cape Denison, Antarctica, a landing also hampered by adverse conditions, a landing made by scientists rather than soldiers, and a landing in Australia's own region of the globe, deserves our attention and was imbued with similar symbolism and sentiment.

In January this year I had the great good fortune to accompany the Australian Antarctic Division voyage to Commonwealth Bay to commemorate that landing. It was also the most important marine science expedition of the season, led by Steve Rintoul. Mawson would have wholly approved of the voyage's double purpose.

After the commemoratives ceremonies at the hut, I climbed Azimuth Hill where the memorial cross to Belgrave Ninnis and Xavier Mertz stands clearly on the skyline, surrounded by penguin colonies. Ninnis and Mertz both lost their lives in the course of the tragic sledging journey that almost defeated Mawson too.

In November, 1913, after their unexpected second winter at Cape Denison, Mawson and the six men who'd stayed behind to await his return from that journey solemnly erected a wooden cross to the memory of their dead friends. The cross honours their supreme sacrifice to the cause of science.

As I sat there are among the nesting Adélies, gazing out across the sea at the sea ice to the tiny black dot on the horizon which was our ship, I was moved by this choice of words etched in the wood, which seemed so emblematic of how the men of the expedition saw their endeavour. Their friends died not for the glory of Empire or for the pride of a nation, they died for the cause of science. And they are not mere words. Ninnis and Mertz died on a crazy, unheroic but earnest quest to understand more about Antarctic geography, and the last year of their lives, like those of their companions, was devoted to the daily discipline of survival and scientific recording.

The priorities of the expedition were clear from the very moment they landed. No sooner had the huts been built and a housewarming feast held on 30 January, 1912, than daily meteorological recording began on 1 February. Ninnis and Mertz built two Stevenson screens to house recording instruments, work began on the construction of the absolute magnetic hut and magnetograph house, a tide gauge was installed, biological and geological monitoring and collecting was begun, and seals and penguins were butchered for winter stores of meat and blubber.

The men began to prepare for their first exploratory sledging journeys. So it wasn't until the summer was almost over, not until the scientific infrastructure was in place, not until 25 February, that Mawson set aside the time to raise a flag on that pole above the hut. And if the weather had been better that day, they would not have been there but out and over the crest of the polar ice cap, exploring, measuring, probing the unknown.

So what did Mawson say in his after-dinner speech that night in the hut? It delights me that we know. Mawson himself didn't record it, it was the meteorologist Cecil Madigan who captured its essence in a diary that has not yet been released to the public, so I'm grateful for his family's permission to quote his entry for that day.

Mawson didn't talk about sovereignty, he talked about science. He said, 'He said we were snug and comfortable et cetera. We were in a much worse place than any Antarctic expedition had ever landed in, the weather was far worse, it looked as if these winds were constant and sledging would be most difficult. No other expedition had been game to land here. Perhaps it was a terrible region—we were going to prove it. The meteorological results would be very valuable, the magnetic work, the biological work, but of more practical value at present was the geographical work—we must explore.' And that last word was underlined.

Science was more vital even than ceremony for morale. It was science that justified their presence for at least a year on this remote alien continent and that helped secure them to this windy place. These young men, mostly Australian, mostly in their 20s, mostly university educated were jumping out of their skins to apply their fresh scientific curiosity and training to new and challenging terrain. Science was their intellectual sustenance, their emotional anchorage, their daily heroic discipline, and perhaps it might also keep them sane.

If we want to honour the legacy of this expedition, then the real commemorative act is in continuing to conduct inspiring science in Antarctica, as many of you here are already doing, and in helping scientists and scholars from other nations to do it too. Thank you.

Robyn Williams: Professor Tom Griffiths at the Australian Academy of Science. He is an historian and biographer.

Credits

Comments (1)

Rajan Venkataraman :

28 Jun 2012 9:27:07am

What a great talk! Interesting, thought-provoking and frequently hilarious. Griffith's ability to draw out the wider significance of events is exceptional. Thank you for making it available to a wider audience.